I want to use ember.js in an application. Found that there are 3 gems for that:
emberjs-rails
rasputin
ember-rails
Not clear which one to go with. Please help me decide.
I would recommend going with ember-rails, the officially maintained gem. Paul Chavard, the author of rasputin, has recently brought a lot of the good ideas from rasputin into ember-rails.
Ember-rails pre-compiles handlebars templates and work with multiple extensions (".js.hjs", ".hbs" or ".handlebars"). It's also flexible in how templates are referenced from within your ember views (see the options in the README).
Unfortunately, I think there's been a temporary issue pushing updates to the gem to rubygems.org. For now, if you want to work with the latest rev, you'll need to include the gem straight from git:
gem 'ember-rails', :git => 'git://github.com/emberjs/ember-rails.git'
Related
My rails 4 project depends on Comfortable Mexican Sofa (CRM) which is loaded as a gem.
I checked out this gem as a submodule of my git repository.
Moving forward, this gem is becoming part of my project: I'm adding features to it
that depends on classes of my projects.
I would like to keep this gem as a submodule (to be able to pull changes from
the main repository) but still be able to add code that rely on my project.
What's the cleanest way to achieve that ?
(should I put the whole gem submodule into my lib folder for instance ?
should I keep it referenced as a gem ? etc...)
should I keep it referenced as a gem
Yes, you need to keep it referenced as a gem.
One of the benefits of using external libraries is that they are maintained by a group of very clever people (most of the time). It would be highly unlikely that you're going to be able to keep the submodules you include up to date as much as the gem owners etc.
What you're best doing is either overriding specific parts of the gem (EG like how many people override Devise functionality with their own controllers), or to see about creating an API for the gem, which you can populate from your app.
For me, in development, separation is always better then binding. I would recommend to leave it as gem and develop in the separate repository.
I am relatively new to Rails and I have a question about serving assets from a gem vs just loading the files into the asset pipeline.
As far as I can tell, they do virtually the same thing in that they both make the files available in the asset pipeline to be called in the manifest.
What are the advantages to serving something like gem 'jquery-rails' as a gem instead of just putting /vendor/assets/javascripts/jQuery.js in the vendor assets and loading it that way?
The advantage is you don't have to add the file(s) to your repo and manage updates, you update the gem and you've updated the dependency. They can also add helpers to use the assets more easily.
Not all JS/CSS projects are out-of-the-box compatible with the asset pipeline too, so sometimes the gems will do that work for you as well.
Just because the files get served to clients doesn't make it much different than any other dependency in your application.
The gem includes the unobtrusive javascript for Rails as well as jQuery itself. It also allows you to user assert_select_jquery in tests.
jquery-rails is gem contains js file for both jquery.js, jquery_ujs.js. If you does not include jquery-rails, then you have include both jquery.js and jquery_ujs.js.If you are not using gem for jquery-rails, you have manually keep track what version jquery.js is used for jquery_ujs.js. Currently these dependency management is taken care by gem 'jquery-rails'.
Benefits:
You don't need to manually copy them when you get a new version of
jquery released, gem will make sure to add the latest codes only.
Check this link:
https://github.com/rails/jquery-rails/blob/master/lib/jquery/assert_select.rb#LC48
It provides couple of methods which helps while testing your code.
I am using a gem that somebody else wrote to serve the fabric javascript library. The gem is using an old version of the library (1.3) and I'd like to be using 1.4 (the latest version). I haven't found any other gems using this version. My question is, is this the best way to load assets, or is there a more preferred method? And, if so, how would I go about building this gem with the latest version of this library?
In my opinion, it is good to do so in most cases.
In your situation, depending on how much time you have, you may want to do one of the following:
1. Contribute to the gem
If the gem is open source, you may fork it, update to the newest version, and do a pull request.
By this way you also give contribution to the rails whole and the others who are facing the same problem as well.
Downside is this takes time. You have to wait for the author to accept the pull request and wait for the next version of the gem. But you can point your Gemfile to use your forked version until the new version is out ;)
2. Write your own gem
Writing a gem for rails providing assets is actually not difficult. You may follow other existing gem's structure and should be easy to understand.
A good example is https://github.com/rails/jquery-rails
Downside is you have to maintain the gem. Otherwise when fabric 1.5 is out, another one would ask the same question as yours again.
3. Put the assets in your vendor directory
Rails project by default do have a vendor directory. It's ok to put external assets here as well.
The above are my preferred way to manage external assets.
based on the needs of my app, I need to make a modification to paperclip, it's only one line but it makes all the difference for my apps needs.
In my Rails 3 GEM FILE I have the following:
gem 'paperclip', '2.3.5'
With github, how does one go about making there own paperclip GEM? So I can use it on Heroku?
Something like
gem 'paperclip', '2.3.5' -> my version?
Would love to hear how this is done. How this is maintained as paperclip is updated. and how I use this locally and on Heroku.
Thanks
Here's the github page on 'Forking'. http://help.github.com/forking/
You must fork the repo on github. Then, instead of passing a version in the Gemfile, pass the following:
gem 'paperclip', :git=>'git://github.com/username/repo.git'
Why are you creating a gem for this? You can monkey patch the gem. This will allow you to use the standard version. What is the change you need? What is the link to your gem, may be there is an easier solution.
I have features I would like to be portable between my own Rails applications.
I wonder if I should create a gem or a plugin for each feature I want to be portable (sharable).
They are just for Rails (for now) because they include css, html, js and image files.
But I have been wondering, the things provided with plugins could be provided with gems too but not the opposite? So maybe it's better to learn how to create gems, because then you I don't have to learn how to create both gems and plugins? And gems seem to be more popular these days.
But then, from what I can understand one gem is shared between all rails app in the OS. So that means I can not customize it for each Rails app right? In that case, maybe creating a plugin is better cause it should be allowed to customize (editing css, js etc) each feature and to have it stored inside the Rails app itself and not in the OS level.
Some advices would be appreciated!
UPDATE:
So gem works great with css, html, js and image files? In a plugin I think you can have a MVC, your own models, views and controllers. Quoted from Rails guides "Storing models, views, controllers, helpers and even other plugins in your plugins". Is this possible too in a gem? Eg. I want to add a extension that gives me a nice Shopping cart (with own migrations, mvc, asset files) that will be hooked into the current Rails app. Is this possible as gem or only as plugin?
You're right that gems offer a little more than plugins. Versioning and dependencies on other gems being the main ones for me.
One gem needn't be shared across everything using ruby. You can install multiple versions of a single gem and specify in your environment.rb that a gem requires a specific version. E.g.
config.gem 'my-gem', :version => '1.2.3'
Also you can freeze gems into your rails application so that you know you are working with a specific version.
You might want to look at the jeweler gem which makes creating your own gems easier.
UPDATE
To include CSS, javascript etc I think you'll need to make an Rails engine which can then be bundled as a plugin or a gem. I've not done this but there's some coverage here and here.
The push with Rails 3 seems to be towards gems and away from plugins as a lot of support has been added to make gems work as well or better than plugins ever did. A well constructed gem is a great thing to have and share between different applications, and also reduces the amount of testing you will have to do since you can test the gem thoroughly before integration.
For extensions to Rails that use CSS, HTML and other assets, it might be that you need to build an engine to bundle this all up and allow it to fit neatly into an application.
As of Rails 4, plugins will no longer be supported.
Gems are the way forward.